


Batteries Feel Included

by ergo_existence



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: M/M, one quoted slur from the show [contextual], set during the Chorus saga
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-08
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2018-03-16 20:58:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3502544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ergo_existence/pseuds/ergo_existence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ghosts have a tendency of returning, not always peacefully, not always by choice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ɛ / α

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a prologue, a beginning, an end, of sorts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was spurred to post this. This is only a prologue, and feedback for it would be great—I'm a little rusty with school and all. It will be Church/Tucker, but if you know me, I'm gonna be a deep ass and stretch this pairing right out.

**ɛ**

Despite everything, death still seemed to be a constant companion to Leonard Church. In all of his incarnations, from the Director, whose soul seemed to die a little each day by his own obsession, to Alpha—teamkilled and left wandering, then floating out of existence, _adios, fantasma tonto_ —to Epsilon.

He’d seemingly escaped utter oblivion, by all kinds of means. He was a fucking laserface-ball and narrowly missed the Meta’s hands; housed himself in an abandoned house for artificial intelligence, _welcomed the end openingly,_ even, because he had tried to make goddamn peace.

The 50/50 split of the universe, that obscene chance your life could be fine and happy and full of shooting-the-shit or being beaten to death with your own skull, appeared to be in his chances.

Of course, it never stays that way.

Not when there’s ctrl+f+u, a special hotkey command made just for the teamkilling by his teammate. Not when everything can topple in over itself, watch your non-existent feet fly away, feel the data banks absorb into the atmosphere.

*

Is he human?

What is death, even, to an AI? An end. A deletion. A finish.

 _It’s what makes us human_.

Delta’s full of himself, lately.

*

It’s like a ticking time bomb. He can _feel_ it. He knows he won’t make it out of Chorus. He knows he won’t. He won’t. He won’t. Why does he know this?

He’s memory incarnate, not Cassandra, not a seer, not a prophet nor a psychic. (Okay, so maybe he _was_ a prophet briefly to the aliens in the desert. All right. That was a good memory.

It’s funny how even though the split between Alpha and Epsilon was the trauma of a past burnt down their backs, he holds and cradles those dear, dear, dear times all he can. When everything was blue and red, when he conjured it all back just for the sake of it).

There’s not much he can say, except that this is the story of how he dies, and this is the story of how Alpha reconstructs himself.

It’s ten dollars for a ticket straight to fucking hell.

*

He’s ready, more than he can ever fucking be. He’ll go out complaining and kicking.

 

α

*

You can feel molten tar down your back. You can taste nothing. You attempt to breathe in air, but the movement feels like tin scraping down your ghostly throat. Ghostly because, Alpha, you’re a ghost.

( _Artificial intelligence_ ).

Did you know your eyes feel groggy? They do. It’s peculiar. You have no organic eyes, but you can see lots of things. A shitload of things, actually. You also feel like you are on fire. You’re not quite sure if you are combusting.

Everything is blue.

*

You keep fading in and out, and it’s not like you’ve had gin that tastes like paint thinner recently—you have little recollection of anything beyond—

beyond—

Beyond what?

Red dirt. Heat.

 _Red dirt. Heat._ You can’t remember. You’re supposed to _remember_. Well, _you_ aren’t. That’s what you know. _You_ were never about memory.

*

Elbow grease.

That doesn’t even exist.

*

He was aqua. You know he aqua because turquoise was too light of a colour and you don’t know any other names of that minty-sorta colour that’s kind of green but not. So he’s aqua.

You? You were cobalt. You’re pretty sure. You can see that. The light is fluorescent. It doesn’t hurt your eyes.

*

There’s a really fucking annoying English accent, you know that, a breathy-villainous kind of growl in the distance (he says _unfortunate_ three times, _lame_ ), and another voice which, in all fairness, sounds like a fucking tool.

How’d you get here?

They mention something about EMP’s (pronounced _emp_ by them).

That’s right.

You were supposed to be _dead_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, as always.   
> xoxo


	2. prime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We need you to be awake for this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go. I'm crossing my fingers you enjoy it.

Church snorts to himself. Assholes with money and power never change, and they always try and destroy your fantasies of a Halloween-esque existence.

He doesn’t like being only a foot big, but there’s limitations off the software he’s running from. It’s a portable unit, of course—you can’t expect a backwater company like Charon Industries to have nice shit. Well, they were extremely lucrative, Church’ll give them that. But he just wants to bag on them a bit. There’s little else he can do.

He knows the man sitting across from him, hands tightly bound in his lap and flanked by two orange and green soldiers, is named the Chairman. He prefers Control as a title, because the dude’s got a complex, evidently.

The Chairman reaches forward to wave an intercom on, and says: “The installation appears, surprisingly, to have worked. Well done, Dr. Joan. That salvage certainly helped.”

He collapses his hand back before Dr. Joan has a chance to respond; Church catches an _Ahh, Sir,_ and then _capiche_.

What a fucking joy-ride this will be. Church only likes that shit when he does it _himself_ ; watching that doc get interrupted was like watching a mirror.

Church doesn’t like mirrors.

The room isn’t clean. It’s grimy and dirty, with sky-blue hologram controls here and there. No janitor around apparently knows how to clean the windows looking out to space. Church is sure he can spot _That Shitty Brown Planet_ in the distance, but it’s actually just a clod of dirt.

It’s a shitshow, really.

He still doesn’t know where he was last.

His eyes—Alpha can’t escape human terminology—flicker between the three figures, and he feels naked, bare, stripped. Of something. He can’t place what.

“Locus, fetch the scavenged body,” the Chairman says, after a long sigh. Church can bet the fucker’s spent his life going from air-conditioned room to air-conditioned transport, never spent a minute in the heat or without what he _wanted_ , that he just sighs for the fucking sake of it.

 _have you ever seen the sun set around here how do you even tell the_ time

There’s murmurs he can’t hear behind the flooding of _memory,_ he can hear footsteps, can hear—

It feels like he passes out, but he’s sure it’s more like an involuntary system reboot.

*

Alpha is carted around everywhere. There’s wires and tests and more wires and so many fucking _wires,_ it’s like they _live_ off the goddamn things—well, technically, at the _moment_ Church is living off them, if he’s living, if this manic mode he’s in and half-dead half-alive consciousness really counts, at the end of the day.

He felt like he was suspended in the air, dangling, cyberspace—words keep sliding past him, and he keeps _turning_ and they’re _gone_. So he pushes out his hands in his bank, bank _s_ , the little space where there’s Important Things kept, parts that are locked…parts that are named _Really Important_ and _Things Caboose Should Not Be Allowed to Do,_ and _Dear Future Me_ —

_Caboose_

_Ca-boose. Caaaa-boose._

There’s a rise of anger in his gut and he can’t place _why_. His fingers continue digging and it’s like a graveyard, everything is dusty and dirty, hazy, foggy, _Dear Future Me, If You are Reading This, You’re the Best—_ Church has an ego—and there’s a _name he is trying to place_. He knows there’s _goodbye_ , and something tells him not to go near that, that’s a hardwired code that’s bound to break him, no, there’s like a shred _dangling_ , this part that’s fleshy and meaty and is _human_. Warmth, mixed with bittersweet anger, aqua, aqua he _remembers the aqua, if all goes quiet remember the aqua,_ what is it—he remembered it for a second before, before it all _slipped_ —

Alpha’s on the precipice, feet pressed over the edge, he can swallow this space and understand it, now, but he can’t fathom the mountains in the distance, the cold-pressed sky, the black and blue and red, the gaps in between.

But, he supposes, this is what happens when you die.

But, he supposes, this is what happens when you are _reconstructed._ He was wiped out. He was _wiped out_. He was dead. He looked death straight in the eye and said _sup, motherfucker_ , because if anything is clear now, it’s that. Because he felt dead when he woke up, and if he can sympathise that feeling, then he can _connect_ it.

The thought vanishes, his mind ropes all tangled and cut.

He’s in a white room. It’s white. Tiled. Gritty. Grotty. He bites the word: _fuck_. Fuuuuuck.

“ _Fuck!_ ” He says it aloud.

Dr. Joan’s voice sparkles its way up from the other side of the room, tinkles, “Alpha?” and he wants to vomit. There’s no recollection of what _induces_ that feeling, but goddamn does he want to fucking chuck everything he has, memories and all.

“What the fuck do you want?” Church says, her figure coming into view, a titan stature.

“I’ve never encountered an artificial intelligence like you,” she says, pince-nez balanced on her nose. “Swearing so much. When I got you back online, all you did was _swear_. Violently.”

“So maybe you should’ve left me _dead_.”

“How about,” she muses, “we talk about something else.” She smiles. Her head cocks to the side, a bird-like action. Her grin is plastic, hard and smooth and artificial. Her lips are cherry-red, smudged, hair shaved, the light shining off it like a bald halo. “I don’t even need this, you know.” She taps the pince-nez. “I just _like_ it.”

“I don’t like _you_.” He’s petulant. He’s allowed to be. He wants to know what the _fuck_ is going _on_.

“Tell me, Alpha, how are you feeling?”

 _That phrase. He chokes_ —

“Call me Church.”

“Protocol. Alpha, on a scale of 1 to 10, what’s your current state of _calm_?”

“On a scale of one to ten?” He hums, thoughtfully. _Hah_. Thoughtfully. “I’d say about _go fuck yourself_ out of _go die in a hole_. Does that make sense?”

Dr. Joan tuts her head. “That’s a shame.”

“A shame? A shame you and that fucking _Chairman_ are pieces of shit that won’t even _tell me_ what the hell is going on? How about you—”

Dr. Joan leans in, and the close proximity to something live and breathing is startling enough to interrupt his proclamation. Something niggling in the back of his head tells him this is a _monumental_ occasion.

“You say you’re fine, and we can have this over and done with much more quickly, you know.”

“Why do you want to _help_ me?” he hisses.

“I want my lunchbreak.”

He narrows his eyes, except when he looks down—his body’s there—he notices a familiar blue glow, a SPARTAN suit of armour, a mirage that’s—

_boo, motherfucker_

“Go to your fucking lunchbreak.”

Dr. Joan reaches for a holographic data-pad, flicks her thick wrist in a left-right-left motion, and saunters out quickly.

He feels his corporeal shoulders shake. He shrinks. There’s something he’s missing.

 _Home_.

It’s alien.

Alien. Alien. A yodeling, garbled noise—what’s that, he can’t quite _place it,_ baby, _pregnant_ —

*

His eyes feel as though they are flickering, and he is disjointed, left arm to the right and right arm has all but left existence, and voices hiss and crackle in the background—he cannot tell if they’re really there, if they’re _here,_ but he does distinguish between the Chairman’s cocky, assured accent, and the Others.

That’s what he’s naming them, because Church feels fucking _occult_.

_shisno_

He’s trying to figure out what that means. It pops up, every now and then—it’s said in an overt robotic, staidly tone.

_are you Hungary Tucker are you—_

The person saying that has got to be a fucking idiot.

So he keeps drifting.

What’s the difference between drunk semi-existence and nonexistence? That’s the question, though, isn’t it—what it is to be an AI, the need for electric fuel and batteries to feel included?

What a fucking _life_.

*

When he slips back into consciousness, this time, he has a fucking _body_. A _real body._ A _body_. A body. A _body_.

“You’d be surprised at what we found at the abandoned Freelancer facilities. I wish we could spend some more _personal_ time together, Alpha, but I must be off. Locus will, of course, attend to you.”

 _Why’s he been given a_ body?

He steadfastly tightens his eyes shut, listens to the footsteps reverberate out of the room, the vacuum seal of the door.

Then heavy, steady breathing.

“They could never get the eyes right,” a sure, baritone voice rumbles, leather on velvet. “The polymer they use in the design you are kept in is…better than most. But noticeable.”

He must be Locus. Probably chose the name because he thought if his chest were large enough and he had an imposing gun, he could be a one-namer kinda guy _and_ crack knuckles. What a schmuck. Leonard Church doesn’t get friendly with people, but he _particularly_ dislikes Locus already.

“Basically, what my friend here is saying, is that your eyes are bright fucking emerald. All right, glitzy glamour boy, don’t go lookin’ for diamonds in the sky. I can _tell you_ , there are none. If there were, I’d have blown the sky up. Just like the nice little planet down below,” a second voice joins in, cocksure and grating and _holy shit_ does Church want to punch him.

With blinking eyes and a fawnlike, newborn gaze, Church looks. He _looks_.

_You had a body like this before_

_“You team-killing_ fucktard!”

 _That voice and that_ slur _it’s_ him _who killed you this time Church_

He _chokes_. He has a throat. It’s possibly filled with white foam and processing and bits and bobs and things that are Plainly Not Human, but so far as Church knows—as much as he can infer, from a trace memory, a raw one, the _polymer_ —he at least has the appearance of a human.

So he’s a fucking android. Again, apparently, if the lilted voices rattling around in his brain were anything to go by.

“Any particular reason you wanted to bring me back from the dead?” he says, testing out his lips, his voice—the same as it was before.

“You’ll know in _soon time,_ I can assure you. This is a one-way stop to Inferno, Deadsville, so don’t worry: you won’t be around for too long.” The other one, Not-Locus, says this with glee.

“And who are you?”

“You’re full of questions, aren’tcha? Okay. I’m _Felix_. Pleased to meet you, even if we’re only here on business terms.”

Locus and Felix. What a fucking pair—a screwdriver and a hammer.

“Your death,” Locus interjects to the stagnant silence, “your second death, that is, is one which will follow a close path—”

“You’re telling me this _why_? Dude, are you fucking dumb? If this were an _actual good plan_ , you wouldn’t tell me I was fucking going to _die_ ,” Church cuts over, tongue feeling heavy in his mouth, lips dry. There’s a short amount of amusement he feels, watching the hasty straightening of Locus’ shoulders; he’s not interrupted often.

“This is an execution,” Locus spits out, quickly, his head bowing with his words in emphasisation. “And your knowing of it is imperative. We know you do not wish to be resurrected. And so we will return you once you have fulfilled your use.”

“That’s lame thinking. What if I _wanna_ be alive? I find a nice little fucking paddock and set up a cabbage farm? Then fuckin’ what?”

“You will find that the people you may seek—”

_no I know but what’s your first name?_

_Lavernius_

_“—_ do no longer need you to exist as a team.”

“You think I fuckin’—like I fucking _remember_ any bullshit right now. Bits and pieces, yeah. You think I’d wake up singing show-tunes about the good old days, wishing for my best friend back? Jesus. And what team?” Church scrambles for words.

Church has no clue what the _fuck_ is going on.

“Felix. Call in Dr. Joan.”

“I’m not a maid, I just wanna note this. I am a _trained killer_. Trained. Mercenary. Killer. And you want me to go get Ms. ‘I’m a rebel and shaved my hair Joane’? Jesus _Christ,”_ Felix spits, hands waving out to the sides, exuberant movement, heavy armour impeding the full dramatic swing of his arms. Church notes the avoidance of addressing her as a doctor, then:

_mercenary. freelancer. agent…_

“Hold on. Hold the _fuck_ on. Are you Freelancers?” Church asks, because _freelancer_ pops into his head, a bubble dancing through, a hole rupturing, a waterfall of memories that _jolt_ —

“No,” Locus says, the face of his helmet not tearing away from Church’s form, Felix hovering off over to the intercom.

The short answer is simple enough, or, it’s all there is—Felix returns, carrying a hypo-needle, and before Church can even _react_ he’s—

*

Knocked out.

He’s really fucking loving this pattern of coming and going from consciousness. Loving it. Fucking. Loving it.

“It was a simple automatic shutdown of the artificial nervous system—nice human slang for a processor in his gut, but we go with it—but it was _not advised_.” Dr. Joan’s peal sings into Church’s ear, but there’s a firmness he recognises for a chastising.

“I told you I wasn’t a maid. Or a doctor.”

Ah. Felix. Fucking orange jackass.

“Nonetheless,” Dr. Joan continues, “it seems his memory route categoriser is…not non-functioning, but it’s not allowing the hardwiring to go through. That EMP really packed a punch. Give me an hour and a decent cup of coffee, maybe he’ll start remembering.”

“So lemme see. We organise, what, 20 of the best scientists we can kidnap to resurrect some jackass who may or may not be actually _useful_ , because they've already _got_ an AI. Okay. That’s great. Then the lead asshole can’t recognise a memory integer issue in the first place? Well, fuck me,” Felix says, feet moving in a rhythm, boots bouncing off the floor, the volume bouncing in a way portraying his back-and-forth pacing.

Church coughs and opens his eyes.

The cheap fucking lights kill what vision he may have had for the first couple of seconds, then he adjusts, feels a tingling in his throat.

“If you’re a trained mercenary, you big fuck, what the hell are you doing around _me_ if I’m apparently so fucking worthless?” he asks, bleary, his hand quivering. His armour’s off and his back is on a gurney, the same room he met Dr. Joan, antiseptic pervading his senses.

“It’s called protecting the goods. And overtime.”

“Is there good dental?”

“ _Amazing_. Locus punched my front teeth out once, and I got a nice new white pair the next week. No gold option available, so maybe not the best.”

Church snorts.

“All right, Alpha,” Dr. Joan says, biting her lip and fiddling with an assorted set of hypo-needles and one particularly intimidating standard-issue plasma healer—Church thinks of the colour _purple_ and hears a distant cry. “I’ll let you stay awake for this firework show.”

“Didn’t you say an hour?” Felix asks, removing his helmet and holding a cup up to his mouth, a cup with a cursive _DR. JOAN_ written in permanent maker. It’s coffee. Possibly.

Past the scout helmet Felix wore, Church sees now the identity of Felix. He’s of a Korean ethnicity, eyes in a permanent dagger stare but his mouth revealing a snarky grin, high-set cheekbones that looked sharpened, but perhaps were accentuated by his whole mannerism; Felix held himself with _gravitas_.

Dr. Joan waves her hand in a strange signal, and Church’s gurney begins to fold inward; then, in a few moments, he is seated up, and that’s when he feels the an enormous jack stabbed into the side of his head.

“Coulda given me some _fucking warning_ ,” Church cusses, his had reflexively moving to protect the sudden intrusion. Dr. Joan bats his hand away, a data-pad on the table wirelessly connecting to the port.

Then the room seems to glow.

“So it’s the personal memories that are…ah, I see…general knowledge is available…you know, I’ve never worked on an artificial intelligence whilst they were _awake_. But I have to keep Alpha, you, awake…because this…well, I have to know it _works_ once I _do it_ ,” Dr. Joan mumbles, drifting off here and there, slightly terrifying Alpha back to fucking death.

“See, a memory reboot, that’s—that’s what we’re _doing_ , well, it’s sort of a reboot, that’s old terminology…but you’re an older build, so I suppose it’s…I suppose, Alpha, this will be interesting. Let me just—oh hell, did I just…no, we’re fine. Okay. This should. Not take long. Oh, you _fuck_.”

“Bottom’s up!” Felix toasts Alpha, and Alpha, _Church_ , fucking _sneers the best he can_. Whilst there was a woman working beside him inside his fucking _head_ , of course.

“I don’t know if this’ll do it…hmm…files, _Allison_ —that’s quite a big file that’s sectioned off, _wow_ —I should ask the Chairman about that one…what he knows about that Project…Lavernius? That’s…ah. I’m a mumbler, sorry.”

“Too fucking right,” Church says, swallowing down the feeling at _Allison_ and _Lavernius_ , one a simulated obsession bubbling in his stomach, the other an ache in his hands.

He wonders how much work went into making everything so _human_.

“For your reassurance, Alpha, we did not alter you in any way. We wanted to preserve you. What you feel in the coming moments…it’s processing, the reboot, it will be done—what you feel is all yours. Enjoy it. It’s like seeing your life flash before your eyes as you die, but you’re not dead. Well, not anymore.”

Then there’s a flurry. Of all expressions and deaths and lives, and yells, and huckleberry reds and cussing blues, of shining suns and twenty million fucking degree heat, of fumbling, of fumbling, of _ghosts and other ghouls,_ lost obsessions and new loves and _rebirth_. That’s a continual factor— _rebirth. Rebirth. Rebirth._

It’s like files are being transferred, allowed through, all flickering through his mind and the whole storage in his body—

_Note to future self—Caboose is a fucking idiot._

_Dear dreary diary, Tucker is a dumb fuck. Also tomorrow remind Tucker he is a dumb fuck._

_Sticky note: the Reds are assholes and we have to team up Motherfucking shit_

_Agent Washington is a_ cold motherfucker

Shuttling and shaking and whirring, he’s been degaussed and now he feels all the oil flowing, the red heat—

Of course it was fucking—

Blood Gulch. The sun never set. It was hot. Always hot. Lavernius Tucker. Michael J. Caboose. Donut asked for elbow grease. Doc. O’Malley. _Rampant artificial intelligence._ Shisno. Fucking shisno. He knew it was an insult.

All the colours are startling, and with it, he is ready to sleep and never return.

Dr. Joan slices through the data for a moment, “It should work.”

“So it should,” Felix replies.

Church feels his shoulders slacken.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, as always. I read and adore all comments. xoxo


End file.
